Proactive and reactive construction of memory-based preferences

We are often faced with decisions we have never encountered before, requiring us to infer possible outcomes before making a choice. Computational theories suggest that one way to make these types of decisions is by accessing and linking related experiences stored in memory. Past work has shown that such memory-based preference construction can occur at a number of different timepoints relative to the moment a decision is made. Some studies have found that memories are integrated at the time a decision is faced (reactively) while others found that memory integration happens earlier, when memories were initially encoded (proactively). Here we offer a resolution to this inconsistency, demonstrating that these two strategies tradeoff rationally as a function of the associative structure of memory. We use fMRI to decode patterns of brain responses unique to categories of images in memory and find that proactive memory access is more common and allows more efficient inference. However, we also find that participants use reactive access when choice options are linked to a larger number of memory associations. Together, these results indicate that the brain judiciously conducts proactive inference by accessing memories ahead of time when conditions make this strategy more favorable.